Main Navigation

Tag Archives | Berklee Breathed

Courtesy of Roger Ash at Westfield Comics, here’s a rare item: a Bloom County strip that never appeared (to our knowledge) in the newspaper. It was printed on the top of the box containing the Opus phone from Tyco. The copyright on the box is 1988. Thanks for sharing, Rog!

Soon after Berkeley Breathed decided to end Bloom County in 1989, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist launched Outland. And while there were certain…penguin-ish similarities…in the Sunday-only comic strip, Breathed broke new ground with Outland that made it every bit as fresh and unique as Bloom County was before it.

We’re collecting the entire run from 1989-1995 in a single book—more than 300 Sundays. The proofs just came in from the printer and we should be okaying it for press by tomorrow. From this point, it generally takes about two months until the book will be on sale in stores and online.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the pre-Photoshop days when we actually used paste-ups, rubber cement, waxers, rubylith film, and Graumbacher opaquing paints! (Dates me, doesn’t it?!).

It’s been brought to our attention that in Bloom County Volume Four, the “Meet Deathtongue” Sunday page from December 7, 1986 (which we also used on the back cover) was missing a few words in the last two lines of the final panel. One reader speculated that we exercised “crude censorship” in deleting a reference to the singer Lionel Richie.

Well, I like a conspiracy theory as well as anyone, but in this case, the explanation for the missing words in the “Deathtongue” Sunday is pretty mundane. When Berkeley packed up the original art for us to print the book, the paste-up lettering simply fell off. Neither he nor we noticed it. No censorship, no conspiracy, just old rubber cement!

Sheesh—and you thought there was a deep dark secret! Thanks to the reader who pointed it out.

Here’s the Sunday with the lost lettering re-created in all its original glory